Page 23 of Dark Embrace
The trouble was, she had learned both in the months leading up to her father’s death and the months since then that the boundary between dreams and nightmares was wonttoblur.
Sarah drewher cloak tight about her shoulders. The night was cold and clear, the stars winking bright and pretty against the dark blue-black sky, a sliver of moon offering pale light. Her gaze strayed to the graveyard. There was nothing there save old stones and a single ancient tree, its gnarled branches casting creeping shadows along theground.
Still, she shivered, in part from the chill, and in part from the certainty that he would come, the man who watched her. He would follow her through the wretched, twisted streets and alleys of St.Giles.
He would not approach. He would walk close enough that she would know he was there, but not close enough for her to see him. The patternwasset.
She hated it. Hated the feeling of impotency and the ever-present fear that this time he would break the pattern, draw near, reveal his darkintent.
The wind howled down from the north, pushing up under her cloak, chilling her to the bone. The temptation to take the shortest route was strong, for it halved the distance and would bring her to Coptic Street that much faster. But that route was the least safe of her choices, and so she would take the longer and hope that the crowds kept the man who stalkedheraway.
She began to walk, her cudgel gripped in her fist beneath the material of her cloak. Her steps were quick and sure, her senses alert. She heard nothing, felt no creeping certainty that she was being watched, but the streets were far from safe and she was yet farfromhome.
Home.Such a strange word to apply to the tiny, cramped room where she slept each night. She had grown up in a pretty house with fine china and a pot of chocolate every morning. They had employed a cook, a maid-of-all-work, and her father’s man who was valet, coachman, butler, and footman all rolled into one. They had not been wealthy, but they had made do quite nicely, she and her father, a physician who saw mostly to the health needs of merchants and tradesmen. Not the upper class, but not the poor, which meant her father had always been paidmoderatelywell.
She had never expected her pleasant life to beanythingelse.
But then, inexplicably, her father’s temperament had changed, his mood fraying, his thoughts and actions growing irrational. After months of steady decline and frightening and unusual behavior, he died. He was alive one night and dead the next morning, fallen in the Thames, his body never found. The only reason that Sarah knew anything of his fate was because he had been accompanied that night by an old friend, Dr. Grammercy, who had tried to find him and fish him out of the river, to no avail. It was a terrible and tragic culmination of months of descent into what she suspected was opiumaddiction.
With his death, Sarah had found herself without funds, evicted from her home. She could not say precisely how that had happened. She had never thought her father the type to squander his money, but in the months before his death, he had spent it on something that defied herunderstanding.
A cure, he had insisted. He was searching foracure.
She could have told him that the only cure was to stop taking the drug. She thought now that sheshouldhave toldhimthat.
Well, it mattered little, she thought now as she passed the small cramped houses that backed onto the slaughterhouses, the smell of death and old blood always heavy in the air. Come morning, there would be children running in the street next to a herd of pigs, with inches of blood flowing beneath their feet. A terrible place,really.
She kept her head down as she hurried past. It was too late to change what her father had done, what he had become—an opium addict. She must only find a way togoon.
Turning onto Queen Street, she was confronted by light from the street lamps and sound and a tight press of bodies that she navigated with care. Near Drury Lane, the public houses spilled their patrons into the streets. To her left, two men engaged in fisticuffs, dancing about to the taunts and calls of their fellows. To her right, three women were screaming like harpies, pulling and yanking on an old dress stretched out between them, none of them willing to relinquish theirgrasp.
The next street was narrower, with fewer people, and the street after that narrower and less crowded still. Now her route brought her to a place where she could no longer avoid the dimness and the shadows. There was only one lamp on the road, and tonight it was unlit. She quickened her pace and ducked down analley.
A staircase ascended the outside of the building and a man, bowed and bent, slogged up the steps, a sack of cabbages slung over his back. He would peel the outer leaves off on the morrow and take them to sell as fresh, though they were likely already several days old. It was a trick she had never suspected before her life had brought her to St.Giles.
Sarah scanned the shadows and moved on, unease trickling through her now. This was the part of her trek she liked theleast.
Again, she turned, this time into an alley narrower thanthelast.
Almost there. Her boots rang on the cobbled pavement, her heart pounded a wildrhythm.
She walked very quickly now, the wind tunneling down the alley to sting her eyes, her cheeks, and behind her, she heard footsteps. Not ringing like her own. Shuffling,sliding.
He was there, behind her. She couldhearhim.
Her breath came in ragged rasps and she dragged her cudgel free of the draping material of her cloak, holding it before her at the ready as she quickened her paceevenmore.
There was nowhere safe, nowhere shecouldturn.
The courtyards that fed off the narrow alley held their own dangers, for she knew not what manner of men, or women, might lurk there. In this place, poverty forced even women and children to toss aside morals and do what they must to survive. Calling out for help was therefore not an attractiveoption.
Ahead of her loomed a dark shape, and she skidded to a stop, horrified to realize that a large wooden cart blockedherpath.
From behind her came the sound of cloth flapping in the wind, and she whirled about, her cudgel raised andready.
The light here was so dim, there was only charcoal shadow painted on shadow, but she knew what she saw. The shape of a man loomed some twenty feet away. He was draped in a dark cloak that lifted and fanned out in the wind like the wings of a raven. His features were completely obscured by a low crowned hat pulled down overhisbrow.
He was tall and broad and menacing...familiar somehow, his height and the shape of his shadow...similar to the shadow she thought she had seen on the ward the morning Mr. Scully died. But it was more than that…something elsefamiliar…